I asked a simple question here. If you stopped working tomorrow, what would you miss? 232 people voted. Only 12% said they’d miss colleagues.
More than one third said they’d miss the routine. The traffic jam we face every day when we go to work. The weekly team meeting, the quarterly reviews and all-hands we groan at. 34% of respondents said they would miss it.
The title and the money came a close second. It is not something to feel apologetic about. Money pays the bills. Status is an important psychological need. Nearly one in five said they would simply feel relieved at the thought of stopping. They are probably just done with what work FEELS like. In short, that just how we define work identity.
I am conscious that this is a small sample and I would not build my theory on 232 votes. But the direction of it is hard for me to ignore. Most of us spend more waking hours with colleagues than with our own families, and YET we would not miss colleagues if we stopped seeing them.
Part of it is structural. Friendships are never built inside meetings. They are built over banter and laughter over coffee cups. The tea that took twenty minutes longer than it needed to. Those five minutes before a call while everyone waited for one person to join, created a bond no team building workshop can. None of it had an agenda, which is exactly why it worked.
We now worship at the altar of efficiency. Calendars go back to back, and the tea break is a Slack thread, the link allows you join at 3:00 and leave at 3:29.
But the deeper reason is not about calendars. I think people are choosing to keep it shallow, and doing it on purpose.
The person across from you is treating the relationship as a transaction. When nobody can tell you how long their job will last, a transaction is a sensible protection. The less you invest in relatiosnhips at work, the less is the emotional toll of goodbyes. Nobody says this out loud. Everybody does the math.
Every goodbye is hard if you allowed yourself to care in the first place. So we quietly decide not to – at least about colleagues.
The distance at work is not indifference. It is a way of not getting hurt.
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